Maj Gen W.J. Cawthorn
A brief biography
An Australian general played a little-known but crucial role in one of the world’s deadly flashpoints.
It is from a more hopeful time, of four men, at ease with themselves and each other, who are in San Francisco to notionally assist those who would midwife the birth of the United Nations. To the left, we have an American and a Brit: a State Department Middle East hand and an under-secretary in the British Indian foreign department. To the far right, with a cigarette in hand is a dapper KPS Menon, who would go on to serve as independent India’s first foreign secretary and ambassador to the Soviet Union and China.
Major General Sir Walter Joseph Cawthorn’s life is the stuff of far-fetched fiction, much of it saved from obscurity thanks largely to an excellent biography by Alan Fewster that came out last year. After Cawthorn’s death, Robert Menzies described him as a “quiet man,” perhaps an accidental homage to Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle. Between early 1940s and late 1960s, Cawthorn ran British Indian, Pakistani and Australian intelligence at the highest levels. He served as Director of Military Intelligence in India in the twilight of the Raj as the Soviet threat coalesced. He headed the Australian Secret Intelligence Service between 1960 and 1968, expanding the organisation’s footprint in Southeast Asia, including setting up a station in Saigon as Vietnam heated up.
Fewster’s biography of Cawthorn ends with the story of a senior Australian diplomat visiting the Indian National Security Adviser in 2011. On learning that the diplomat had visited Pakistan, the NSA would point out that the country’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence – the ISI – was founded by an Australian.
The Indian official was referring to Cawthorn. Fewster does not identify the Indian NSA, simply noting that the visiting diplomat “found it curious that his host had Bill on his mind.”
After empire
Cawthorn became Pakistan Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff in February 1948 amid a military and political crisis born out of gross miscalculation.
Second, the Muslim majority in the kingdom would become resentful of the Dogra rule, intensifying in face of the interacting influences of rising literacy, Muslim nationalism, industrial modernisation, socialist precepts, and percolation of anti-British sentiments from the Indian heartland (something Cawthorn kept a close eye on, one imagines with growing alarm, from his perch as a key Raj intelligence honcho).
In October 1947, Pashtun irregulars, with some Pakistan army personnel thrown in the mix, invaded the Maharaja’s kingdom to force his hand amid growing local discontent. On one hand, the gambit spectacularly backfired.
On seeking Delhi’s help to fend off a brutal invasion, the Maharaja was told – artfully – that it could hardly send troops to an independent country. Within days, he acceded to India following which Indian troops began to repel the tribal militia. Even after the Pakistan army formally entered the fray, the situation was far from being ameliorated from Karachi’s viewpoint.
From Cawthorn’s vantage, this was an intelligence failure which he sought to redress through the creation of the ISI, probably sometime in the summer of 1948: an all-services intelligence organisation with civilian representation and strong signals and reconnaissance support. The design and structure reflected Cawthorn’s lifelong professional obsessions. There is very little hard evidence, though plenty of conjecture, to show that Cawthorn viewed the ISI as a sharp scalpel in future asymmetric conflicts with India. In any event, it is believed that the agency developed a covert activities division within a couple of years of Cawthorn’s departure from the Pakistani army.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground turned into a stalemate. In July 1949, India and Pakistan formalised a ceasefire line dividing Jammu and Kashmir. Cawthorn would sign the Karachi Agreement on behalf of Pakistan.
Rebellion and jihad
By the 1950s, the military stalemate on the ground in Kashmir, as Cawthorn observed, was matched by a political stalemate about the region’s future. India had tactically demonstrated faith in the newly created United Nations in resolving the India-Pakistan dispute. But the Security Council’s resolution from 1948 calling for a plebiscite proved to be a non-starter. This was not the least because of the fact that it asked Pakistan to withdraw troops and irregulars from the region under its control as a precondition, something the country didn’t – and still hasn’t done.
As Cawthorn, back in Karachi as Australian High Commissioner, accurately judged in an April 1956 diplomatic despatch, for India “the Kashmir question was closed” even as Pakistan was warning it would settle the dispute through “warlike means” if its allies couldn’t effect a resolution (presumably on Karachi’s terms)…
…
Assuming New Delhi continues to focus on Kashmir’s economy and generate opportunities for the region’s youth …, while providing enough political space for the region’s grievances to play out, Kashmir is likely to go the way of contemporary Indian Punjab, which battled a serious Sikh insurgency a few decades ago. If all goes well, even as bad blood will undoubtedly continue to circulate, Jammu and Kashmir is unlikely to face sustained security challenges, discounting episodic, contained flare-ups. But that does not mean India’s terrorism challenges will fade away too. As far as New Delhi is concerned, India must now reach for a radically muscular security doctrine to meet them.
And for that, we have Cawthorn’s creation to thank.
